Peter Pan Must Die (25 page)

“You’re not the only one here, Jack. Maybe he’s fucking with Dave. Maybe he’s fucking with all of us.”

“I don’t give a fuck who he thinks he’s fucking with. But it’s my fucking house that he’s shooting fucking bullets into.”

“This is crazy. I say we get a SWAT team here, like now.”

“We’re not in fucking Albany. It’s not like they’re parked down in Dillweed, waiting for the call. Be an hour before they get here.”

“Dave?” Her expression was begging for support.

Gurney couldn’t provide it. “It might be better to handle this ourselves.”

“Better? How the hell is it better?”

“You make this official, it’s a big can of worms.”

“Can of … what are you talking about?”

“Your career.”

“Career?”

“You’re a BCI investigator, and Jack’s in the process of launching an all-out attack on BCI. How are they going to interpret your
being here? You think they’re not going to figure out in about two seconds how he’s getting his inside information? Information he can use to ruin their lives? You think you’re going to survive that—legally or otherwise? I think I’d rather deal with a sniper in the woods than be considered a traitor by people I have to work with.”

Esti’s voice was a bit shaky. “I don’t see what they can prove. There’s no reason—” She stopped abruptly. “What was that?”

“What was what?” asked Gurney.

“Out that window … on the hill facing the house … in the woods … a flash of light …”

Hardwick scrambled around the back of the table toward the window.

Peering into the darkness, Esti whispered, “I’m positive I saw some—” Again she stopped midsentence.

This time Gurney and Hardwick both saw it. “There!” cried Gurney.

“It’s one of my trail cams,” said Hardwick. “Motion-activated. I’ve got half a dozen in the woods—mainly for hunting season.” Another flash occurred, seemingly higher on the hill. “Fucker’s moving up the main trail. Getting away. Fuck that!”

Gurney heard Hardwick scrambling to his feet, hurrying out of the room into the kitchen, then returning with two lit flashlights in one hand, Glock in the other. He stood one flashlight in the middle of the table, beam pointing at the ceiling. “I got an idea where the son of a bitch is heading. After I leave, get in your cars, get out of here, forget you were here.”

Esti’s voice rose in alarm. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to where that trail goes—to Scutt Hollow on the other side of the mountain. If I can get there before he does …”

“We’ll come with you!”

“Bullshit! You both need to get out of here—in the opposite direction—now! You get caught up in this, get questioned by the local cops—worse, by BCI—it’ll be an endless mess. Take care. Got to go!”

“Jack!”

Hardwick ran out the front door. A few seconds later they heard the roar of the big GTO V8, wheels spinning, bits of gravel sprayed against
the side of the house. Gurney grabbed the remaining flashlight from the table, hurried out onto the porch, saw the car’s taillights speeding away around a curve in the narrow dirt road that wound down the long wooded hillside to Route 10.

“He shouldn’t go alone.” Esti’s voice next to him was strained and ragged. “We should follow him, call it in.”

She was right. But so was Hardwick.

“Jack’s no fool. I’ve seen him in tougher situations than this. He’ll be all right.” Gurney’s assurance sounded hollow.

“He shouldn’t be chasing that maniac by himself!”

“He can make the backup call. It’s up to him. As long as we’re not there, he can shape the story any way he wants. If we’re there, it’s out of his hands. And your career is over.”

“Jesus. Jesus! I hate this!” She walked in a tight, frustrated circle. “So now what? We just leave? Just drive away? Go home?”

“Yes. You first. Right now.”

She stared at Gurney in the flashlight’s shifting illumination. “Okay. Okay. But this is fucked up. Completely fucked up.”

“I agree. But we need to preserve Jack’s options. Is there anything of yours in the house?”

She blinked several times, seemingly trying to focus on the question. “My tote bag, my shoulder bag … I think that’s it.”

“Okay. Whatever you have in there—get it, and get out of here.”

He handed her the flashlight and waited outside while she went into the house.

Two minutes later she was depositing her bags in the passenger seat of the Mini Cooper.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

“Oneonta.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Be careful.”

“Sure. You too.” She got in her car, backed out, turned down the dirt road, and was gone.

He switched off the flashlight and stood in the darkness, listening. He could detect no sound, no breeze, no hint of movement anywhere.
He stood there for a long minute, waiting to hear something, waiting to see something. Everything seemed unnaturally still.

Flashlight in one hand and SIG in the other, safety off, he made a 360-degree sweep of the land around him. He saw nothing alarming, nothing out of place. He pointed the beam up at the side of the house, swept it back and forth until he found a severed wire emerging from an electrical fitting by a second-floor window and, about ten feet away, a second wire emerging from a different kind of fitting by another window. He swept the light away from the house toward the road until he located the utility pole and the two loose wires he’d expected to find there, dangling down onto the ground.

He walked closer to the house, below the two severed wire ends. On the clapboards behind each, he could see a small dark hole a few inches from each fitting. He couldn’t judge the diameters with any accuracy from where he stood, but he was fairly sure they couldn’t have been made with a bullet any smaller than a .30 caliber or larger than a .35 caliber.

If it was the same shooter who hit Carl at Willow Rest, it would appear that he was flexible in his choice of weapons—a man who chose the tool most appropriate to the circumstances. A practical man. Or woman.

Esti’s question came back to him.
What’s the point of cutting a landline when everybody’s got a cell phone?
From a practical perspective, cutting power and communication lines would be the preamble to an attack. But no attack had occurred. So what was the point?

A warning?

Like the nails in Gus’s head?

But why the landline?

Holy Christ!

Could it be?

Power and phone. Power meant lights, which meant seeing. And the phone? What did you do with a phone—especially an old landline phone? You listened and you talked.

No power and no phone.

No seeing, no listening, no talking.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil
.

Or was he getting way too imaginative, way to enamored with his “message” theory? He knew damn well that falling in love with one’s own hypothesis could be fatal. Still, if these weren’t messages, what the hell were they?

Having switched off the flashlight, he stood again in the dark, holding the SIG Sauer pistol at his side, straining his eyes and ears. The utter silence gave him a chill. He told himself it was simply because the temperature was dropping and the air was growing damper. But that didn’t make him feel any more comfortable. It was time to get the hell out of there.

Halfway to Walnut Crossing he stopped at an all-night convenience store for a container of coffee. Sitting in the parking lot, sipping the coffee, going back over what had happened at Hardwick’s—what he could have done or should have done—endeavoring to organize some reasonable sequence of next steps, the thought came to him to call Kyle.

Prepared to leave a message, he was surprised to hear a live voice.

“Hey, Dad, what’s up?”

“Actually, too damn much.”

“Yeah? But, hell, you like it that way, don’t you?”

“You think so?”

“I know so. If you’re not being overwhelmed, you feel underoccupied.”

Gurney smiled. “I hope I’m not calling you too late.”

“Too late? It’s like nine forty-five. This is New York City. Most of my friends are just going out now.”

“Not you?”

“We decided to stay in tonight.”

“We?”

“Long story. What’s up?”

“A question, based on your Wall Street experience. Not even sure how to ask it. I spent my whole career buried in homicides, not white-collar stuff. What I’m wondering is, if an outfit was looking for major financing—let’s say for expansion—is that something that would get around on the grapevine?”

“That would depend.”

“On what?”

“On how ‘major’ a deal you’re talking about. And what kind of financing. And who’s involved. Lot of different factors. To get into the rumor mill, it would need to be big. Nobody on the Street talks about small stuff. What outfit are we talking about?”

“Something called the Cyberspace Cathedral—brainchild of a guy named Jonah Spalter.”

“Kind of rings a bell.”

“Any facts attached to that bell?”

“CyberCath …”

“CyberCath?”

“People in finance are big on abbreviations, stock-exchange names, fast talk—like they’re too busy to use whole words.”

“The Cyberspace Cathedral is listed on the stock exchange?”

“I don’t think so. That’s just the way the boys talk. What do you want to know about it?”

“Anything people say about it that I wouldn’t find on Google.”

“No problem. You working on a new case?”

“A murder conviction appeal. I’m trying to dig up some facts the original investigation may have ignored.”

“Cool. How’s it going?”

“Interestingly.”

“Knowing how you talk about these things, I’d say that means that you were shot at but not hit.”

“Well … sort of.”

“Whaaat? You mean I’m right? Are you okay? Somebody tried to shoot you?”

“He was just shooting at a house I happened to be in.”

“Jeez! That’s part of this case you’re on?”

“I think so.”

“How can you be so calm? I’d be going nuts if somebody shot at a house I was in.”

“I’d be more upset if he were aiming at me personally.”

“Wow. If you were a comic-book hero, they’d have to call you Doctor Cool.”

Gurney smiled, didn’t know what to say. He didn’t talk to Kyle
that often, although they’d been in contact more frequently since the Good Shepherd case. “Is there any chance you might be coming up our way one of these days?”

“Sure. Why not. That’d be great.”

“You still have the motorcycle?”

“Absolutely. And the helmet you gave me. Your old one. I wear it instead of my own.”

“Ah … well … I’m glad it fits.”

“I think we must have exactly the same size heads.”

Gurney laughed. He wasn’t sure why. “Well, anytime you can get away, we’d love to see you.” He paused. “How’s Columbia Law?”

“Busy as hell, tons of reading, but basically good.”

“So you don’t regret getting out of Wall Street?”

“Not for a minute. Well, maybe for an occasional minute. But then I remember all the bullshit that went with it—Wall Street is paved with bullshit—and I’m really happy not to be part of that anymore.”

“Good.”

There was a silence, finally broken by Kyle. “So … I’ll make some calls, see if anyone knows anything about CyberCath, and I’ll get back to you.”

“Great, son. Thank you.”

“Love you, Dad.

“Love you, too.”

After ending the call, Gurney sat with his phone still in his hand, pondering the curious pattern of his communications with his son. The young man was … what? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? He could never immediately remember which. And for many of those years, especially the past ten, he and Kyle had been … what? Not quite estranged, that was too loaded a term for it. Distant? Separated by periods of noncommunication, certainly. But when the instances of communication did occur, they were invariably warm, particularly on Kyle’s part.

Perhaps the explanation was as simple as the summation offered by Gurney’s college girlfriend decades ago on the occasion of her breaking up with him: “You’re just not a people person, David.” Her name was Geraldine. They were standing outside the greenhouse in the New York Botanical Garden. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom. It
was starting to rain. She turned and walked away, kept walking even as the rain grew heavier. They never spoke again.

He looked down at the cell phone in his hand. It occurred to him that he should call Madeleine, let her know he was on his way.

When she picked up she sounded sleepy. “Where are you?”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t. I was reading. Dozing a little, maybe.”

He was tempted to ask if the book was
War and Peace
. She’d been reading it forever, and it was a powerful soporific. “Just wanted to let you know that I’m halfway between Dillweed and Walnut Crossing. Should be home in less than twenty minutes.”

“Good. How come so late?”

“I ran into some difficulty at Hardwick’s.”

“Difficulty? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Tell you all about it when I get home.”

“When you get home I’ll be sleeping.”

“In the morning, then.”

“Drive safely.”

“Okay. See you soon.”

He slipped the phone into his pocket, took a couple of swallows of cold coffee, dumped the rest of it in a trash bin, and drove back out onto the main road.

Hardwick was on his mind now. Along with the uncomfortable feeling that he should have ignored the man’s instructions and followed him after all. Sure, there was a risk of one thing leading to another, a firefight with the shooter, official law enforcement agencies getting involved, BCI sniffing out Esti’s involvement, having to fudge the facts of their meeting in order to protect her, half-true affidavits, knots and tangles and snarls. But, on the other hand, there was the possibility that Hardwick might be coming face-to-face—or muzzle-to-muzzle—with more than he could handle.

Gurney had a powerful urge to turn around and go back over the roads where Hardwick’s chase was likely to have led him. But there were too many possibilities. Too many intersections. Each one would multiply the odds against duplicating the actual route the man had taken. And even if by some remarkable coincidence he made a series
of accurate guesses and ended up in the right place, his unexpected arrival could create as many problems as it solved.